[lompad]

There is no reason such a state would have to set things up this way.

As an example: you probably know that germany has socialized healthcare. It is, however, not implemented as a single-payer model. Instead there are tons of different insurances competing with each other, while having a highly regulated floor of what they MUST offer.

Is the model perfect? Hell no, it has tons of issues - though overall it's pretty solid. My point is just that social policies and "no internal competition ever" does absolutely not have to go hand in hand. There is a massive middle ground.

See: social democracy as a concept and in its current implementation.

[andsoitis]

> germany has socialized healthcare.

Germany has a dual healthcare system with both public (GKV) and private health insurance (PKV) options. About 10% of residents use private health insurance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Germany

[keybored]

And social democracy forked from the socialist tradition over half a century ago (GGP[1] said socialism/communism). So both you and GP are wrong.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46551378

[lompad]

Problem here being that those terms aren't used as defined in regular discourse. Language changes and casual use differs from academic use.

When on an american-centric board anybody writes about "communism", I assume they refer to anything from marxism to stalinism to socialism to democratic socialism to social democracy up to anything non-hyper-capitalist. Not great, but sadly something to be taken into consideration.

Especially when looked at in context - parent was criticizing the EU initiative by essentially claiming something like that leads to a kind of monoculture like in a planned economy reminiscent of "communism", here probably meaning stalinism, from what I assume is a radical libertarian position. Which tells me the person is likely american, implying a rather ... minimal awareness of the nuance here.

Please, look at the actual comment chain and it should be rather trivial to make out what everybody is talking about. Does your comment really add value here?

[keybored]

The fundamental reason why terms are confused is because malicious actors (bad faith) intentionally set up to at best muddy the waters and at worst associate things they fight against with the worst adjectives. That doesn’t reflect on anyone present right here, just a process that took decades.

I don’t care if someone “doesn’t know” about the nuance when they breathlessly throw back with One Cereal For Everyone Decided By The State. Come on.

> Please, look at the actual comment chain and it should be rather trivial to make out what everybody is talking about. Does your comment really add value here?

I can understand that you think my reply is pedantic noise. That’s simply because we have different goals and things that we intend to communicate. I’m content with setting the record straight. You apparently want to calmly explain the difference between apparent Stalinism and Bernie Sanders-style Socialism.

I think I am able to make out what people are talking about. But you can’t seem to, right in this context, imagine that we all have different goals ourselves about what we wish to get out of commenting here.